


get your way

by perennial



Category: Labyrinth (1986)
Genre: F/M, Post-Canon, and then what happened
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-05
Updated: 2018-02-05
Packaged: 2019-03-13 21:40:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13579455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perennial/pseuds/perennial
Summary: (let me tell you baby now what's in store,you win the battle but i'll win the war)He steps toward her, leans in close. "I know you better than anyone else in existence and you want to call us," his breath is hot on her skin, "friends."





	get your way

Two mornings after her victory in the labyrinth, Sarah comes downstairs and finds her father reading the newspaper at the breakfast table.

She tells him, "An owl has moved into the tree outside my window. Can you get rid of it?"

He considers. "Owls are good for the ecosystem. It's probably keeping mice and moles away. Rabbits, too. Maybe we'll actually get to see the tulips bloom this year."

"It's keeping me awake at night. I haven't slept well in ages."

"Ages, eh! Well, that changes things. I'll call animal control and get them to relocate it."

That's not going to work. "Can't you shoot it?"

Her stepmother says, "Gracious, Sarah."

Her father says, "I thought you loved animals."

"Not this one. It's a menace."

Her father is amused, and she can't very well tell him why he ought to be taking this more seriously, but he promises to see what he can do, and she pretends to be satisfied with that.

-

Her stepmother says, "It's a white noise machine. You can turn it on at night, to block out the hooting."

It's not going to help. The goblin king's presence is the problem; he has yet to make a sound. Shelly couldn't know that, of course, though legitimate ignorance makes no difference to a belligerent teenage stepdaughter with a chip on her shoulder. Sarah a week ago would have rolled her eyes and answered with a sarcastic _great_. Now, though, she smiles at her stepmother and thanks her, taking the box and secretly wishing the problem was so easily solved.

The look of surprised gratification on her stepmother's face makes Sarah wonder just how nastily she's treated her. She knows her attitude has been awful—she's made sure of it. But she's also believed it justified. Shelly is an evil stepmother. She's mean and selfish and wants to steal all of Sarah's father's attention and leave her to do all the thankless chores.

Sarah looks at the noise machine in her hands and has the uneasy suspicion that she might have been wrong about more than one of those things.

She thinks of the kindness of Ludo (currently hiding in the closet) and wishes she could tap into his source. The motivation to make her family suffer is gone, but she's still rusty on how to actually be nice.

She looks at Shelly and says (uncertainly, hopefully): "Do you think you could help me set it up?"

-

Her father calls animal control, who tell him there is no evidence of an owl within a mile radius of the house. They set traps, which come up empty of their intended victim but do manage to catch a bluebird and a dove, at which point Sarah, in tears, asks her father to take them down.

The owl is there every time she opens her blinds. He roosts in the branch right outside her window and stares in, never seeming to need or desire anything but the view before him. He is there when she wakes in the morning and there when she gets home from school and there when she goes to sleep, and he could be carved from marble for how much he appears to move.

She tells him, "You seem to have a lot of free time. Ruling your kingdom must be really boring. I'm glad I didn't agree to become your queen."

She didn't think it was possible for owls to glare, but this one is glaring. She shuts the blinds with a fwap.

-

He doesn't leave.

Morning, afternoon, night. Summer, autumn, winter, spring. Ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth grade. He's always there.

After a while she stops questioning it. If this is how he wants to spend his life, so be it. He never tries to get inside her room. He never tries to communicate with her. He doesn't do anything but sit and watch. She knows better than to trust him, but she doesn't have any reason to fear him.

She owes him, sort of ( _owes_ is a strong word, and not one that should ever be used around him), for forcing her to grow up, to get over herself, even if none of the actual credit for doing it belongs to him. That, combined with the fact that he never reacts maliciously to her taunts, lays the foundation for an odd sort of truce. It's hard to be cruel to someone who does not return the favor. If he of all people can be decent, she can too.

She falls into the habit of updating him with her small victories and failures: the final grade on a test he watched her study for, a birthday gift for Toby she's excited to give which he watches her wrap, her concern over choosing the right college. He's right there, after all, a constant riveted audience. She is careful to never say anything that might double as an invitation into her room.

(Sometimes her caution makes her laugh, because how conceited can a girl be? She doesn't know what his motivation is anymore; all he does is sit in the tree. If he still wanted her, he would have given up after a year or two, right? Maybe observation of her boring day to day life really is more interesting than ruling his kingdom. And then she cringes, because if there is anything she is certain of it's that Jareth has an unearthly capacity for patience and that the appearance of disinterest does not signify lack of it; and then she is hyper-aware of her words for days.)

She makes plans for college and feels the first sharp prick in her heart. She drives away and deliberately doesn't look at the tree by her window. She opens her dorm window to two round yellow eyes.

"Oh, you've got to be kidding me!" she exclaims, and she's a good enough actress by now to not give away even the slightest indication of relief. Even she isn't sure that's what she's feeling.

She has an awful feeling he knows anyway. It would be the sort of thing he would know.

-

She jumps into college life and doesn't slow down until graduation. She has roommates who would notice her talking to him, so she hardly ever does, although no one ever mentions the owl right outside the window. Sometimes she remembers him long enough to rant about a particularly difficult professor or a high-maintenance friend or lack of finances. Sometimes friends will be chatting in her room and they'll say something particularly hilarious or idiotic and she'll reflexively glance toward the window. But for the most part she's too busy to remember him, and by the time she graduates the window has become little more than a portrait of an owl in a pine tree, a background block of color she rarely registers anymore.

She graduates and gets an apartment with two college friends and the pattern resumes. She works three jobs and she goes on dates and she stays up too late laughing with her roommates and she hoards quarters for the laundromat. The dates don't go anywhere. One of the jobs does.

She moves into her own apartment and buys a new car and starts thinking seriously about grad school. She hosts dinner parties and game nights and she starts a box garden in her kitchen windowsill. She waves to the owl when she sees him, but she doesn't have time to talk, and she usually doesn't have time to pick him out from among the leaves and branches.

-

She's been on the missing persons unit for two years when it happens. Sarah realizes that in the back of her mind she's been waiting for this.

She drives home berating herself. She has a lot of gall, doesn't she? As a teenager she had taken it for granted he would always be there, dangling, ready if she beckoned. Not a lot has changed, apparently. But now she isn't even sure he's still around.

The evening is quiet and mild; spring is still gearing up for summer. Her apartment is on the second floor and there's a mature sycamore right outside her living room. She goes to the window and shoves it open. All she can see is darkness; she can hardly make out even the shape of the tree, blinded as she is by the lamplight behind her.

"I need you," she whispers.

A shimmer of glitter and there he is, leather-clad and platinum-haired, a slice of unreality standing in the middle of her living room. At the sight of his face her heart does a funny sort of lurch which she hopes is disguised by the utter shock that is filling every other part of her body.

He beholds this with scorn. "What, you thought that because I never came to you as a human, I was unable to? Not the case at all, Sarah."

"You haven't even aged."

"I reordered time. It's a handy talent."

She has forgotten how tall he is, forgotten the scent of him, forgotten the sound of his voice. She's forgotten the way his mismatched eyes seem to be able to see invisible things.

"You need me," he prompts, and she is thrown back into the present.

"Did David and Maya Salerno wish their baby to you?"

"What will you give me in exchange for such valuable information?"

"I'll answer any question of yours."

He shows her a sharp smile. "Agreed."

She hasn't forgotten that smile. "How can I know you're telling the truth?"

"I've never lied to you, Sarah, and I never will."

"Not good enough."

He looks disappointed but unsurprised. "If you insist, we can use a lie detector." He waves his hand and a black box appears on her coffee table. She regards it with suspicion.

Jareth rolls his eyes. "We can test it on your answer first, if you like."

There are no wires or straps. All she has to do is lay her hand on the box. There is a small hole in the top but nowhere to read results. She wonders if it would be worth her time to drive back to the station and get one of the certified machines.

They pull the table closer to the couch and sit. He hasn't given any indication that he is going to make a nuisance of himself but Sarah still wedges a small throw pillow between them. She places her hand on the lie detector.

Jareth says, "What would it take to make you accept my offer to be my queen?"

She says, "Not if you were the last man alive."

A shine appears at the hole and a bubble slowly emerges. It floats up into the air before them and vanishes with a small pop, but not before they both see the word it carries on its surface: Lie.

Sarah grinds her teeth and says, "If I had no other option."

This time the bubble says True.

Jareth picks up her hand and removes it from the box. He lays his on top instead.

Sarah says, "Did the Salernos wish their baby to you?"

"No."

The bubble says True. She grimaces, frustrated. "You know where he is, though, don't you?"

"Ah-ah, Sarah. New question, new deal."

"Fine. Ask your question."

"No, this time I want something else." He leans very close to her, so close she can feel the warmth of his breath on her cheek. "A kiss."

No other option, indeed. She walked right into that.

"A kiss isn't information," she says. "The trade isn't equal."

"When doesn't a kiss relay information?" he contradicts, and she begrudgingly admits he's sort of right.

"So contrived," she mutters. She wonders what he's after. Some investigator she is; she's forgotten that he likes the long con. What kind of information is he seeking, if this isn't about brief physical pleasure?

She turns toward him, closes her eyes, and braces herself.

"Remember, Sarah, that the quality of the kiss you give me directly correlates to the quality of the information I give you."

Her eyes fly open. "Wait, I'm kissing _you_?"

"How else did you think this was supposed to work?"

"You give me information and take a kiss."

"Oh, Sarah, no. You give me a kiss, I give you an answer. Much as you would like to play the passive role in this, that isn't how I operate."

She thinks of the Salerno baby and the clock ticking down. She tries to summon up the hormones of her fifteen-year-old self, the ones that found him attractive even in the midst of her disgust. As it happens, they are right there at the surface, ready for action.

(Best shut that down, before it turns into information.)

She takes a breath, slides both hands up into his hair, and locks her mouth to his.

—And all of a sudden she is learning all the answers to long-forgotten questions. The smoothness of his lips. The firmness of his mouth, the heat within. The slide of his tongue.

His hand grips her waist and slides up to her ribcage; the other skims over her jaw, tangles in her hair, holds the back of her head.

They break apart, breathing hard. She scoots backward and grabs a pillow, hugging it to her chest, her heart pounding, eyes on him.

He tells her where to find the baby, almost down to the exact coordinates. Then he takes a long look at her, bows, and vanishes.

-

It takes Sarah all night to find a plausible way to draw lines to the information Jareth gave her out of their existing clues, but she does it, and a little before dawn they find the kidnapped Salerno baby in a crude dugout in a field next to a river, hungry and cold but otherwise unharmed.

The morning is foggy and cool. Birds call quietly in the distance. The mist curls through the trees that line the field, muting the voices and movements of the people working the area.

The forensics team is still going over the ground. Sarah sips coffee and waits for her cue to re-enter the crime scene. Soon the news crews will be here and after that the paperwork will start. She breathes deeply, enjoying the lull, luxuriating for a moment in the rare euphoria that comes from finding someone before it's too late.

She turns to walk up the hill back to her car, wanting her gloves, and stops.

He's in a black trenchcoat that hides the leather but does nothing to hide the hair, which is cropped short (she can't tell if it's real or illusion) but still shines like a beacon. His hands are in his pockets and he's watching the workers. When she sees him his eyes flick to her.

She walks over to him. She holds her coffee cup in front of her with both hands and meets his gaze squarely.

"What am I to you?"

He looks at her and makes no move to speak.

"Fine. To me, you're my friend."

He doesn't like that _at all_. "Friend?"

She falters. "I thought we were friends. Aren't we?"

He steps toward her, leans in close. "I know you better than anyone else in existence and you want to call us," his breath is hot on her skin, " _friends_."

She's actually trembling. "What would you call it?"

"Soulmates, Sarah, what else?"

"Soulmates," she repeats. Who uses that word anymore? She's still sifting through her feelings and discovers he's hurt them. "I thought it was kind of a big thing, actually, being friends, all things considered."

He's unimpressed. "I've seen you with your friends. That isn't what I want from you."

"What do you want, then?"

"What I've always wanted."

"You only want what you can't have. Once you have me you'll lose interest."

"Sarah," he says, "if you knew how I burn for you, you would know nothing could ever end it."

It takes a moment for her to start breathing again.

She manages, "I know better than to trust you."

He tips his head and looks at her. She doesn't know what to call the look. Not pleading, exactly. Aching. _I've never lied to you._

He gestures toward the teams working the crime scene. "You know just as well as I do this isn't the last time you'll ask me for information. We can do this my way or your way."

"My way," she says automatically.

He is unsurprised and amused. "Are you sure?" he says, that smile flickering in and out of his eyes. "We both know how it will end. Are you really such a masochist?"

He takes her hand in both of his and runs his thumb over the soft underside of her wrist. He bends his head and slowly kisses her palm. His touch rushes through her whole body and settles somewhere in the current between her heart and abdomen.

"I have waited a very long time," he tells her. "Don't think I'm going to run out of patience anytime soon. I want you, Sarah, and I'm not going to jeopardize my chance, but don't think that means I'm going to take this slow. We're here now, finally, and you might be doing this your way, but believe me, I'm doing it mine."

A voice comes in over her radio handset: a summons to the lower field where the dugout is located. She's up.

"Yeah," she answers breathlessly. "On my way."

She walks down the hill, still clutching her forgotten coffee cup, the hand he kissed in a fist in her coat pocket. She looks back over her shoulder at him. He stands like a black sentinel, watching her go.

This could be the start of a horrible partnership.


End file.
